South of the Border, Upside-Down Mexico Way

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South of the Border, Upside-Down Mexico Way
In remote Zapatista country, the good people of Chiapas are engaged in a once-a-year change to upend the world. Men become women. Night becomes day. And a pilgrim in a rental car is barreling toward them.

By Doug Stanton

It was the opportunity to fling the dung of a strange land across the abyss of centuries that kept me watching while a Catholic priest, a transplanted Frenchman known as Padre Miguel, cleared the main square of the Maya village of Chenaló in preparation for, of all things, a fire-eater's midnight performance.

"Attention, amigos!" barked the padre, who despite 30 years as pastor of this tiny parish high in the mist-shrouded mountains of southern Mexico hadn't lost his Parisian flair for theatrics. "May I present a friend whose performance, I'm sure, will amaze us all!"

The fire-eater, a backpacking New Zealander with an ornately pierced eyebrow, was swinging his blazing batons and shooting long flames from his mouth. The villagers milling in the square fell silent—too uneasily silent, I thought, as I felt the first rocks rain down upon us. Shouts of "Diablo! Diablo!" rose among the women in the crowd, some of them looking as if they might faint as they jabbed fingers at the fire-breathing man.

I felt sorry for the women—and then for myself as their husbands, having never seen a man breathe fire, circled us gringos warily. Padre Miguel shouted for calm. We ran.

It was then that I heard my friend Rob cry for help. He was crouched on a side street, surrounded by a gang of Maya policemen, each wielding a length of polished wood bound with a thin leather shoulder strap. Their canes were upraised. Shouting from the sidelines and gesturing wildly was a man wearing an embroidered shawl and head wrap.

Rob spotted me and explained that he'd been shooting pictures, as he'd been given permission to do by a village elder, when he was approached by another elder, this one dressed as a woman. He pointed to the man in the shawl. In the cosmology of the festival we were attending, this man/woman signified the change that all things were undergoing. Men were now women. Up was now down. We named the little prick Phyllis Diller.

At first, Phyllis had cordially offered Rob pox, a homemade sugarcane brew with the bouquet of jet fuel. To refuse an offer of pox is a grave insult, which in itself might result in a beating. So Rob drank. But when the man discovered that Rob was a photographer, he grew angry and summoned the police. Now he wanted Rob's camera.

Pablo Quiñones, our mestizo translator, hissed at Rob, "Give him your camera!" Rob refused, explaining that he had permission to take pictures. "They will beat us," Pablo said, agitated. Later, we would learn that two foreign photographers were, in fact, severely beaten during the festival. Pablo next pleaded with Phyllis, to no avail. "Now he says he wants money," he announced.

Our ransom was 300 pesos, about $60, which seemed cheap, considering the alternative was a supreme ass-whipping. We had, however, only 100 pesos between us. A restless crowd of perhaps 50 villagers closed in. Upon hearing we couldn't pay the money, Phyllis puffed his chest and said, "Then you men will leave this village without your pants!"

"Excuse me, Pablo," I said. "Did he say our pants?"

"Our pants," he answered. "There is nothing we can do. We are in their world."

Over the Border, Off the Map

Rob and I had been driving Mexico's Ruta Maya, the Maya Route, which is part of a 1,500-mile string of highways and border crossings weaving through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. We had started in the Yucatan, near Cancún's crowded oven of a beach, and were spinning south and west into country less explored by gringos: the state of Chiapas, home of the insurgent Zapatista rebels. Our destination was the town of San Juan Chamula, near the Guatemala border, which was preparing for the most sacred and raucous of all Mayan celebrations—a midwinter bacchanal when spirits are said to rise up and walk the land and the living get the chance to kick back and blow off a year's worth of pent-up steam.

The Maya call this festival of spiritual renewal Ch'ay K'in, "the five lost days." In his book Crazy February, American anthropologist Carter Wilson describes it as "a fiesta of wildness, of men in women's clothing, mock battles with horse dung, and rituals run wrong on purpose." The world is turned upside-down, and creatures are reborn.

What would it be like to turn my own world upside-down, I wondered, if only for a little while? Mexico is so close, conjuring the usual paradisiacal visions of bleached beaches and brilliant sunlight that bites longingly at the back of your neck. But it was that other portal I wanted to pass through—the one that led to a place where paradise was a mad hatter's creation, where the rules didn't apply, where I wouldn't be playing things so safe. I used to travel this way, and it had created some interesting moments. But now the risks had narrowed, and I'd uncomfortably begun to understand what writer Jim Harrison calls the theory of Christian fat. The theory holds that when we begin living responsible lives we purposefully get fat to make it more difficult to get off the couch and leave the house, where we might be tempted to take chances—to, say, go to Mexico and throw dung with strangers. I was 34, married, a father, and troubled by the fact that recently my young son had looked at me and said, "Dad, you're starting to remind me of Elmer Fudd." I needed a quick escape. The journey would be my disappearing act.

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